Category Archives: Virginia Politics

I’ve watched the drip-drip-sploosh of revelations about Bob McDonnell’s with a sense of recognition. As the charges become more serious (daughter’s wedding yields to Rolex yields to $50,000 to McDonnell’s wife yields to $70,000 to McDonnell’s business), it’s feeling a lot like the financial improprieties that accompanied his 2005 campaign for attorney general.

Bob McDonnell is going through the same steps now as he did eight years ago:

1. Deny the allegations.
2. Confess to the allegations.
3. Claim that he’s within the letter of the law.
4. Call for the law to be amended to prevent this sort of thing from happening.

In fact, he’s already gone through all of these four steps, but in much less time than eight years ago. This time, of course, a grand jury has been convened, so shit got real pretty fast, accelerating the McDonnell Denial Cycle.

The Washington Post editorial board wins the Most Prescient award for their October 27, 2005 editorial about McDonnell:

If he wins on Nov. 8, he’ll become Virginia’s foremost law enforcement official. Yet as things stand, he would enter office tainted, complicit in ignoring the state law that insists the public should know where candidates get their cash. If he approaches this law with a wink and a nod, why should he be trusted to enforce the others?

(Because employees have come and gone during the prescribed period, some have received training in other branches of government. Others received training as a part of their continuing education requirement by the state bar.)

This is now the source of Richmond Sunlight‘s campaign finance data about each candidate (currently limited to their cash-on-hand and a link to their most recent filing), which provides me with a good incentive to continue to improve it.

If you’ve got ideas for how to improve this still-young project, you’re welcome to comment here, open a ticket on GitHub, or make a pull request. Hate it, and want to copy it and make your own, radically different version? Fork it! It’s released under the MIT License, so you can do anything you want with it. I look forward to seeing where this goes.

This time last week, I got a surprise in the mail. A couple of weeks prior, I had sent requests to both the governor and the attorney general’s offices for some pretty boring records—a list of everybody in their offices who had received the ethics training prescribed under the law. These records are explicitly FOIAable, so I anticipated that I’d just get an Excel file e-mailed to me before long. I wasn’t looking for anything in particular, but the FBI probe into Bob McDonnell and Ken Cuccinelli’s relationships with Star Scientific made me wonder if the proper ethics training had been provided. Five business days later, both offices got back to me saying that they’d need another five days. No problem. Then, last Thursday, I got home to find a letter in the mail from Cuccinelli’s office. Busy packing for a flight the next day, I didn’t get around to reading it until late at night, just before bed. This was the letter:

I found the letter difficult to understand, in part because of the lateness of the hour, but on the third reading, I figured it out. The attorney general’s office was claiming that a) they did not need to offer ethics training b) they did not need to comply with FOIA. Having no idea of how to respond to this, and knowing I’d have no time to deal with it for at least five days, I simply scanned in the document, posted it to DocumentCloud, tweeted about it, and went to bed.

It quickly emerged that I was not the only person to be told by the OAG that they were complying with FOIA only as a matter of courtesy, I was merely the first person to tweet about it. Roz Helderman wrote about the matter for the Washington Post, and David Ress wrote about it for the Roanoke Times. (The Times had also been told by the AG’s office that FOIA didn’t apply to them.) These stories were published on Sunday, the same day that the prior day’s Republican convention was on the front page. What should have been a day full of post-convention-bounce news, helpful to the newly minted nominee for governor was, instead, marred by coverage of Cuccinelli’s extraordinary claim. The timing by Cuccinelli’s office was amazingly bad.

So how did the attorney general’s position seem ironic? Let us count the ways:
A believer in original intent is ignoring the plain meaning of the law.
To do so, he rests his case on an appeal to judicial authority that he shows little regard for in other cases — such as Roe, Kelo, or the Supreme Court’s 2012 ruling upholding Obamacare.

He thereby seems to suggest a state agency with a staff of dozens and a budget of $36 million has to disclose less than, say, a researcher at the University of Virginia whose work has been questioned by right-wing activists. Cuccinelli spent two years and untold sums trying to pry loose the private correspondence of climatologist Michael Mann. Poor Mann — if only he had had the presence of mind to claim he was, like the AG’s office, not a “public body.”

Virginia’s top lawyer is not above the law. Nor is Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli just doing his constituents a favor when he responds to requests for public records.

Cuccinelli’s startling epiphany that he is exempt from the Freedom of Information Act came at a convenient moment. He is running for governor while being pelted with questions about his relationship with a businessman who has a pending dispute over state taxes.

It was tempting for Cuccinelli to slather himself in a potent Scandal Proof Formula to shield himself from the state sunshine law.

To truly appreciate the absurdity of the legal argument, consider this: The public-records law that staff members in Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli’s office said did not apply to the attorney general specifically mentions the office four times.

[…]

[Their] explanation is ludicrous, its reasoning so twisted that it can only be understood through its ultimate goal: To deny requests made by this paper’s sister publication, The Roanoke Times, and others for office records and correspondence involving a company entangled in a federal investigation and multiple lawsuits, including one against the state.

It’s no wonder Virginia received an “F” grade from the State Integrity Investigation, a watchdog organization that monitors the risk of government corruption in each of the 50 states. While Virginia ranks 12th in the nation in population, it ranks 47th in the organization’s key measures of government transparency. The Attorney General’s policy shift demonstrates what can happen when a weak FOIA law combines with an insipid judicial precedent: We get a culture of need-to-know governance that undermines citizen access and decreases government accountability.

To be clear, the logic employed by the OAG (constitutional officers don’t have to comply with FOIA) is total nonsense. In § 2.2-3701—the definitions that establish the application of terms for the entire chapter about FOIA—this is made explicit:

For the purposes of the provisions of this chapter applicable to access to public records, constitutional officers shall be considered public bodies and, except as otherwise expressly provided by law, shall have the same obligations to disclose public records as other custodians of public records.

[T]he Attorney General’s office maintains a FOIA page on its website that advises citizens: “You have the right to request to inspect or receive copies of public records, or both.” The page outlines detailed instructions for how to request information from the AG’s office, along with a list of the AG’s responsibilities — such as “the Office must respond to your request within five working days of receiving it.”

In brief, this is not a matter on which intelligent minds may disagree. It’s a silly claim, and I find it baffling that the AG’s office would make it, especially when not actually refusing to release any information. Nothing is gained by this, and, as OAG discovered, much stood to be lost.

In the end, I’m not sure that it matters what Cuccinelli believes he’s obliged to do, as long as he actually complies with the law.

So here I am, a week later, and I still don’t have an answer to the boring question that I posed in the first place: Is the attorney general’s office providing ethics training to its employees? I’m coming at the question from a different angle now, having asked the governor’s office for related records, and I hope to find out the answer. It doesn’t strike me as a very interesting question—I figure that, whatever the response, it’ll merit a tweet and a blog entry consisting of sharing that response. I wish I knew what all the fuss was about.

Many months ago, an acquaintance was invited to join a small gathering at the estate of erstwhile Charlottesville-area millionaire Patricia Kluge. Kluge was inviting some women over to a brunch at Albemarle House, an event at which the honored guest was Virginia’s first lady, Maureen McDonnell. Unbeknownst to the invitees, the host was teetering on the edge of bankruptcy. When they showed up for the event, Albemarle House was off-limits—soon to be sold on the courthouse steps—and the puzzled guests were directed to one of the model homes, bare of furniture. Left standing around in the living room, with no brunch to be found, their host and the first lady soon showed up. After only a brief introduction, McDonnell began to deliver a pitch. Gradually it dawned on the attendees that this was some kind of a pyramid scheme diet-pill scam. One by one, they slipped out, desperate to escape the suffocating awkwardness of the weird affair.

I was told this story shortly afterwards, and mostly found it baffling. The first lady? Hawking scam diet pills? What in the world? I had no frame of reference for such a story, and I decided to keep it to myself.

With the benefit of time, this story is no longer baffling. Instead, I get the sense that it’s a piece of a larger puzzle, a puzzle that a state-appointed prosecutor and the FBI are trying to assemble. There is a relationship between the governor, the first lady, and Star Scientific, a Virginia-based company that recently got out of the cheap-cigarette business and into the dietary supplement business. Star and its CEO have given $120,000 to McDonnell and his PAC, but apparently also gave some undisclosed gifts to McDonnell’s family, including his wife, Maureen. Star Scientific is in rough shape—they have enough money to get through early next year, but they keep having to sell more stock to pay the bills. They’re doing everything that they can to stay afloat. To that end, Maureen McDonnell went to Florida a couple of years ago, to promote their product, Anatabloc, in a talk.

I don’t know that Maureen McDonnell was promoting Anatabloc on that awkward day. (I don’t think any of the attendees were taking notes.) And I don’t have any reason to believe that doing so would have been wrong in any way. But I do think it’s a heck of an interesting coincidence, and I look forward to finding what it’s all about.

Since creating Richmond Sunlight and Virginia Decoded, I’ve been building up a public trove of datasets about Virginia government: legislative video, the court system’s definitions of legal terms, court rulings, all registered dangerous dogs, etc. But they’re all scattered about on different websites. A couple of years ago, I slapped together a quick site to list all of them, but I outgrew it pretty quickly.

The Dangerous Dog Registry as JSON, meaning that programmers can take these records and do something interesting with them. (Imagine an iPhone app that tells you when you’re close to a registered dangerous dog.) Previously I provided this only as HTML.

VDOT 511 Geodata. This is the GeoJSON that powers Virginia 511, exposed here for the first time. Road work, traffic cameras, accidents—all kinds of great data, updated constantly, with each GeoJSON feed listed here.

There’s so much more to come—good datasets already available, and datasets that need to be scraped from government sites and normalized—but this is a good start. I’m optimistic that providing an open, accessible home for this data will encourage others to join in and help create a comprehensive collection of data about the Virginia government and its services.

Today was a big day for Senator Henry Marsh. The legislator of twenty years took a rare day off during the Virginia Senate’s 46-day session, to attend President Barack Obama’s second-term inauguration in Washington D.C. For the 79-year-old black civil rights lawyer, attending a black president’s inauguration on Martin Luther King Jr’s birthday is perhaps the most auspicious of occasions. Certainly nobody would object to him missing just one day. Looking at today’s legislative calendar, he would have seen that his absence wouldn’t be problematic, with nothing contentious on the agenda. (With the Senate split 50/50 between Democrats and Republicans, and with a Republican lieutenant governor acting as tie-breaker, that’s no small point.)

Marsh grew up under Jim Crow. He had a ten-mile round-trip walk to his one-room schoolhouse—an awfully long trip for a seven-year-old—while white kids took a bus to a modern school. Marsh didn’t let racism hold him back. He didn’t just graduate from primary school, but went onto college. When he was a senior at Virginia Union University, the Byrd Machine was organizing “massive resistance”—shutting down public schools rather than comply with Brown v. Board of Education—and Marsh got involved, testifying against the policy before the General Assembly. In doing so, he met famed civil rights attorney Oliver Hill; at Hill’s encouragement, he got a degree in law from Howard University, and later went into private practice with Hill, focusing on civil rights law. Marsh and his practice were responsible for huge advances in civil rights over the decades, eliminating “separate but equal,” busing, and racial discrimination in hiring. Along the way he became the first black mayor of Richmond, and was elected to his Senate seat in 1991. Today he chairs the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Commission and created the Martin Luther King Jr. Living History and Public Policy Center.

So it bears repeating: today was a very big day for Henry Marsh. He must have taken a great deal of satisfaction in seeing his life’s work culminate in the first black president’s reelection, being sworn in on Martin Luther King Jr’s birthday. It was a very, very good reason to miss a day’s session.

Today was also a big day for Senate Republicans. They knew that Henry Marsh would be at the inauguration today, and that the 20–20 split in the Senate would become a 20–19 split while Marsh was 100 miles north, among the throngs on the National Mall. So today was the day that they decided—without hearings, advertisements, notifications, or warnings—to take a chunk out of Marsh’s district, along with a handful of others, to ghettoize black voters in a majority-minority district and put 45% of voting-age citizens into new districts.

I sat in the Senate gallery, along with no more than perhaps a half-dozen other people, slack-jawed with confusion (tweeting all the while) as Republican Sen. John Watkins filibustered through the allotted 15 minutes to discuss what was advertised as the third reading of a pretty boring bill, making technical adjustments to district boundaries. Unbeknownst to anybody but the 20 Senate Republicans, the bill had been replaced with a radical redistricting, combining two senators into a single district (eliminating the district of 2009 Democratic gubernatorial nominee Creigh Deeds), reshuffling district boundaries throughout the state to absorb those changes (to Republicans’ apparent favor in a half-dozen districts), and creating a “black district.”

Senate Democrats tried repeatedly to get a word in, but they were blocked procedurally. A series of votes were held (votes about voting, votes about reconsidering voting about voting, and so on), all failing 20–19, during which a few people got to make remarks. One Democratic senator moved to simply put the vote off until tomorrow, so that there’d be time to read this brand-new bill. That vote failed 20–19. Another Democratic senator pointed out that this was simply unconstitutional (“[t]he General Assembly shall reapportion the Commonwealth into electoral districts in accordance with this section in the year 2011 and every ten years thereafter”). One Republican senator insisted that this was simply a racially sensitive improvement, since it was establishing a majority-minority district. Another Republican said that there was no need to hold hearings on this new redistricting, because they held hearings a few years ago, last time they redistricted. Yet it remained unclear throughout what, exactly, this bill did, though Democrats were frantically trying to figure that out as they stalled with round after round of procedural vote, a peeved Lt. Gov. Bill Bolling presiding over the whole affair. Finally there was nothing else to be done—the vote was held, and the bill passed, 20–19.

Senate Republicans’ MLK Day gift to Senator Marsh and to Virginia is to use the re-inauguration of the United States’ first black president as cover to pass a bill that will make it harder for black candidates to get elected.

When a candidate is described as “divisive,” generally it’s intended to mean that while his own party loves him, the other party can’t stand him. In what’s shaping up to be a race between Terry McAuliffe and Ken Cuccinelli for the Virginia governorship, there are two wildly divisive candidates who are perhaps more divisive within their own parties than outside of it.

Four years ago, McAuliffe came in a distant second in a three-man race for the nomination for governor (despite raising $8M), won no geographic portion of Virginia, and endeared himself to nobody in the process. He’s never been elected to public office and has no constituency. The percentage of Democrats who would definitely not vote for him exceeds the percentage who would vote for him. That’s not in the primary—that’s in the general election. McAuliffe is a Clinton-era Democrat, the sort of old-school Democrat accustomed to winning elections by sucking up to power brokers, the sort who was purged from positions of power in the party round about 2005. It’s his turn to run for office, you see. He’s a glad-hander (it’s always “good to see you,” never “good to meet you”), always ready with the grip-and-grin. His performance at the 2009 Jefferson-Jackson Day Dinner really said it all.

And the Bill Clinton thing. Good Lord, the Bill Clinton thing. Guess who McAuliffe just got off the phone with? Guess who he just played golf with? You know who told him the funniest thing the other day? McAuliffe cannot stop mentioning Clinton because it’s all he’s got. Terry McAuliffe : Bill Clinton :: Marge Simpson : Chanel suit.

McAuliffe’s business bona fides aren’t much better. Global Crossing. (Need I say more?) His current business, Greentech Automotive, recently established an auto plant…in Mississippi. Despite that McAuliffe knew full well that he’d be running for governor of Virginia, touting his business experience on a platform of creating jobs. (“The main reason Terry is running for Governor is to make it easier for companies to create jobs right here in Virginia,” says his spokesman.) Why didn’t he build the plant in Virginia? Oh, it’s not his fault—it’s the fault of Virginia Economic Development Partnership! “It was their decision,” McAuliffe spinelessly informed The Note. How was the location of his factory a decision of tiny state agency? They wouldn’t pay him enough to locate his plant in Virginia. Yes, McAuliffe believes that states should bid for businesses (an economic loser just about every time), even his own business, not by creating environments conducive to running businesses and recruiting employees, but by just offering cash. This, of course, is why this company was located in Hong Kong when he bought it—in a globalized economy, a lowest-bidder approach will leave manufacturing out of the U.S. permanently. Mississippi, you see, is the U.S.’s version of a third-world country. Perhaps McAuliffe will be running on a platform of making Virginia more like Mississippi? In their defense, VEDP says that McAuliffe never even completed their application. McAuliffe shopped around for a state in which to open a factory the same way that he shopped around for a state in which to run for governor. Virginia’s apparently great for running for governor, but not so great for building “cars” that are legally identical to golf carts.

Not one Democrat in a hundred is excited about McAuliffe. Democrats are fired up about him the same way that Republicans were fired up about Mitt Romney. The base will fake it through November and, if he loses, they’ll all say how they never really liked him in the first place. If he wins, of course, they always believed in him!

Then there’s Ken Cuccinelli. Christ, what an asshole. “Extremist” has seldom been a more suitable word to describe a candidate. He supports a no-exceptions ban on abortion, opposes homosexuality (period), thinks Virginia needs Arizona-style anti-immigration laws, believes that global climate change is a conspiracy theory, and thinks that President Obama didn’t really win reelection last month. He has 95% of the traits that have been laying waste to the Republican Party in recent years, save one—he’s not dumb. In fact, he’s an intelligent guy, and a too-common mistake made by Democrats is to believe that just because he professes wildly retrograde, utterly contra-factual beliefs, that he must be a fool. He is not. (This is in sharp contrast with Sarah Palin, Rick Perry, Michele Bachmann, etc., who, even collectively, are dumber than a sack of hammers.) Unlike McAuliffe, he actually has a base, and he’s been elected to office repeatedly. He represented Fairfax in the General Assembly for two terms and, of course, successfully ran for attorney general. While McAuliffe is a generic sort of a centrist-ish Democrat who is hobbled by a terrible personality and the perception that he’s a carpetbagger, Cuccinelli is hobbled by holding views that are wildly out of step with Virginians, Americans, and the facts. I’d guess about 20% of the electorate probably adores him, but far more deplore him (or will, come next October).

Cuccinelli is the sort of social conservative that’s driving a wedge into the Republican Party. Regular ol’ fiscally conservative Republicans have tolerated allowing this type into the tent so long as they’ve furthered the same collective goals, but it’s started to get embarrassing (e.g., the Tea Party). Those regular Republicans were victorious in the nomination process for the presidency this year, allowing Romney to defeat a field that consisted largely of crazies, but after Romney’s loss, it’s not clear which side will be running the party soon. Dick Armey’s departure from FreedomWorks (one of the the Koch-funded companies that created and bankroll the Tea Party) is the latest evidence that the conservative power brokers have lost control over their own creations—the inmates are running the asylum. Cuccinelli is proudly on the inmates’ side of the fence, and unless he’s prepared to tamp down that image, he’s going to have a tough time getting support from the kind of Republicans who supported Mark Warner over Jim Gilmore. This, of course, is why Lt. Gov. Bill Bolling is flirting with running as an independent. His is the wing of the party that thinks that the grassroots need to be trimmed back (to abuse a metaphor), the wing that Cuccinelli is going to have a tough time wooing, and a tougher time still if Bolling gets into the race.

Power-brokers on both sides are pooh-poohing talk of primary challengers and third-party candidacies. When former congressman Tom Perriello demurred a few days ago, that was the prompt for Democrats to declare that it’s time to get behind McAuliffe as our candidate. This has not been greeted with enthusiasm.

All of this reminds me of the Republican presidential nomination process in 2008 and 2012. Reviewing every candidate, there was a clear and obvious argument to be made as to why they couldn’t possibly win the nomination. And yet somebody had to win and, indeed, somebody did. Neither Cuccinelli nor McAuliffe can possibly win a gubernatorial election. And yet—unless somebody else enters the race—one of them will.

This is the worst kind of election, the kind in which a supermajority of the voters in each party have to support not their preferred candidate, but the one whom they loathe the least. (To be fair, this is how some voters feel about every election.) That may be what makes it such an ideal race for a solid third-party candidate like Bolling to take a run at election. Russ Potts’ 2005 gubernatorial candidacy was a threat to Republican nominee Jerry Kilgore, but there was never any danger of him winning the election. Republicans were OK with Kilgore, and Democrats liked Tim Kaine. Things are different this time. If Bolling can trim his sails a bit (he is a conservative Republican after all), he can take votes from both candidates, money from both sides, and I think it’s entirely possible for him to win. At least, then, it’ll be possible for somebody to win.

“The opening of the 495 Express Lanes means opportunity for Virginia,” said McDonnell. “The project not only helped create jobs during construction, but will continue to make Northern Virginia a more attractive place to work and live.”

Last year, McDonnell told us that government couldn’t create jobs. But today, he tells us that, it could and it did. I wonder what happened in the intervening year?